By the way, Jeffrey, I could swear I saw or heard somewhere that you recently finished all five Seasons of The Wire. Given that you're one of our favorite film reviewers around here, do you have any thoughts? I think we'd all love to hear them.

What did you think of the story arc given to the Bubbles character?

Did Season Four tear at your heart like it did mine? It was the Fourth Season, everything from the first three seasons suddenly being forced upon 4 little kids, that I suddenly was overcome with what David Simon was doing for us.

“The Attorney-General’s kind remarks are noted and appreciated. I’ve spoken to Ed Burns and we are prepared to go to work on season six of The Wire if the Department of Justice is equally ready to reconsider and address its continuing prosecution of our misguided, destructive and dehumanising drug prohibition.

“[The US government's war on drugs is] nothing more or less than a war on our underclass, succeeding only in transforming our democracy into the jailingest nation on the planet.”

Wow. The mold was broken after Simon, wasn't it? You've got to admire his prickly consistency and his immunity to the praise of the powerful.

Homicide certainly pushed harder on convention given its prime time context. The Wire is what happens when good TV writers are given as much room to play as they want to, which is a freedom Homicide never enjoyed.

This is a pretty accurate statement, I think. I love Homicide, for what it's worth (I'm glad I italicized that!), but I have to disagree with Christian...as perfect as the first few seasons were (and they really were), they started losing me each season after that.

But lovable characters in the Wire? I don't know if a week goes by that I don't think about one of them with a smile.

Hmmm. I didn’t “love” the characters, but that’s not to say that I wanted them to be “lovable,” which suggests connotations I didn’t intend.

Do I think of them often? Not as often as you do, Jason, but I do think of them sometimes. That’s not to say that I loved the characters. I agree that they’re memorable, many of them.

Darren: I have the heart of Tom Reagan. In answer to your questions, No, no, no, no, no and no. I did have a soft spot for Lester, Bubbles and even Clay Davis (!), but I didn’t love those characters the way I loved Frank Pembleton, or Kay Howard – or even John Lange, who, as played by Vincent D'Onofrio, made a huge impression for just one episode.

The single commenter who swam against the tide by suggesting that The Wire is an inferior version of Homicide: Life on the Street, was quickly taken to task by other commenters. (We cannot at this time verify the Wire-skeptic’s whereabouts.)

I finally finished THE WIRE. My wife and I had held off on seasons 4 and 5, but we finally finished watching them.

Season 4 was, bar none, the most moving television experience of my life. Other seasons were more exciting, more invigorating, but the character work in season 4 was the finest in the series. By the end of it, my wife and I were devastated.

Season 5 was good, and served as an effective end-cap for the show, but on the whole, it's probably my least favorite season. In part because it's painful, given that it centers on the implications of a few destructive choices, but also because its look at the media isn't particularly vivid.

Season 5 was good, and served as an effective end-cap for the show, but on the whole, it's probably my least favorite season. In part because it's painful, given that it centers on the implications of a few destructive choices, but also because its look at the media isn't particularly vivid.

I thought the same thing, which is strange, since David Simon was a reporter before he worked in television.

My friend who works at HBO says they are chopping the top and bottom off the 4 x 3 frame for the early seasons to "fit" 16 x 9. We saw this with FX's Simpsons Marathon and I really wish companies would stop doing this. It wasn't cool to chop the sides off Lawrence of Arabia and it is likewise not cool to chop the head and neck off of Stringer Bell.

My friend who works at HBO says they are chopping the top and bottom off the 4 x 3 frame for the early seasons to "fit" 16 x 9. We saw this with FX's Simpsons Marathon and I really wish companies would stop doing this. It wasn't cool to chop the sides off Lawrence of Arabia and it is likewise not cool to chop the head and neck off of Stringer Bell.

There seems to be some debate as to whether The Wire was *shot* in 4:3 or merely *cropped* to 4:3 for its original broadcast. If the latter, then the high-def remastering would actually contain *more* information rather than less.

Babylon 5, a considerably older show (i.e. it predates the existence of DVD and the widespread availability of high-def TVs), was shot on 35mm film and broadcast in 4:3, but the DVD was remastered for 16:9 because they reframed the elements, in many cases showing *more* than what the original broadcast had shown. *However*, the visual effects were rendered by computers for 4:3 presentation, so all of the *visual effects* shots were cropped to 16:9 and thus showed *less* than what the original broadcast had shown.

This means that, when you're watching an episode of Babylon 5, if someone walks down a hall, it usually looks quite good (because it was mastered from the original film). But if they turn around a corner and the picture quality takes a drop, that usually means a visual effect (a laser blast, an alien decloaking, etc.) is about to happen (because the entire shot was rendered in video-quality 4:3, and now the image has been *blown up* so that it can stretch from one side of the 16:9 screen to the other, thus resulting in a lower-resolution image).

The recent high-def remastering of Star Trek: The Next Generation (which, I believe, preserved the 4:3 aspect ratio) got around this by *re-editing the entire series* (the original edits had been done in video, but for the Blu-Ray they went back to the original film elements and digitally spliced everything together all over again) and *replacing the visual effects* with brand-new effects.